Food Industry Ventilation

Control High Heat Energy Loads

Food production often involves a lot of process machinery and people which can lead to quite high heat energy loads. Typical room temperature requirements can be anywhere between +4oc and +18oc in production areas. High heat loads and low room temperatures lead to lots of cooling demand.

Draught Free Ventilation

It’s not unusual to see air change rates as high as 35 or 50 in a food production cooling system depending upon the circumstances. It’s difficult to deliver lots of very cold air into a space without draughts whilst maintaining comfortable working conditions. Obviously reducing the air volume for the room affects the temperature difference between room and air on temperatures – increasing the ∆t and decreasing the supply air temperature.

The Need For Fabric Ducting in the Food Industry

Practically the only way you can achieve this level of air volume and cooling whilst still maintaining a comfortable level of air movement, distribution and velocity is by using a fabric ducting system. By placing fabric ducts on the ceilings at correct intervals, we introduce a huge surface area of diffusion into the room. Effectively a ceiling mounted displacement ventilation system, where the air exits the ducts at a low velocity and falls in to the occupied zone under its own density as it’s a lot cooler than the surrounding room air. The size and layout of the fabric ducting system allows for good distribution of supply air all over the room.

Micro-Perforation Diffusers For Consistent Air Flow

Prihoda Fabric Ducts use a Micro-Perforation diffuser (our own original design and patent) which allows large volumes of supplied and original room air to mix and encourage low velocity air movement and turnover in order to avoid hots pots and stagnation. Prihoda Micro-perforations also ensure that the duct doesn’t act as a filter (the AHU has the filters which are easy to access and clean) so that it doesn’t get blocked or dirty as quickly as conventional fabric ducting from our competitors, meaning less maintenance time and costs.

Easy To Clean System

Prihoda use a cleanroom quality non fibre shedding material so that there is no chance of fibre contamination within food process or production areas (we are the only fabric ducting manufacturer to do this by default) and we also have available an anti-bacterial material (impregnated with Silver) if required. All of our materials are suitable for Food Facilities and are cleanable in a commercial washing machine (Prihoda also offers a washing/maintenance service if required).